Relax, it's an extra 0. I've fixed the typo. As for OpenGL support, the real issue there is going to be drivers, which is something Intel has never really focused on in their IGPs. Sandy Bridge does fine in DX games (relatively speaking), but I know of at least a couple OpenGL titles where performance is pathetic. I'm not entirely sure where Kristian got the OpenGL/OpenCL support information, though, so I've added "(?)" to the areas where we're not certain of specs.Reply

OpenGL and OpenCL were reported by a German site who leaked quite a lot of Sandy Bridge data too which turned out to be right IIRC. Anand mentioned 16 EUs in IB already in the SB review and I also think he mentioned something about the OpenCL support. The same site is also reporting that the IB IGP will come in flavors of 6 and 16 EUs. Reply

What the heck is your problem? It was a simple typo, if you had any clue what the correct versions were you could have politely replied that it was wrong and what the correct terminology would be. I heard MS is bringing back Clippy, but I hope he is not built to be as much as an @$$ as you.Reply

Oh lord! They hit an extra key on the number pad! What's next? Outright lies? I, for one, will never voluntarily read this top-notch source of information again. In fact I think I see an angry mob forming!(That was sarcasm, you crazy person.)Reply

Probably Intel not wanting people to whine and complain when they buy DDR3-1333 that's not running at the DDR3-1600 rated speed the memory controller is spec'ed at. DDR3-1600, as far as I recall, is still considered somewhat in the upper "power user/enthusiast" realm compared to mainstream DDR3-1066 and DDR3-1333 SDRAM.

So that's somewhat humorous: laptop chips have DDR3-1600 support with SNB, but desktop parts like the 2600K don't. Of course, laptop RAM tends to be less power hungry in the first place which might be part of it. Anyway, the *desktop* Ivy Bridge will get official DDR3-1600 support, which is something desktop Sandy Bridge doesn't have.Reply

Ah, that could be the reason. I know some laptops that will sell you DDR3-1600, but only if you don't use four DIMMs (look at the mobile workstations from Dell and HP). Still, it's odd considering enthusiasts have run far higher than DDR3-1600 speeds. Oh well.Reply

It'll be interesting to see what Intel does with the added die space that 3D manufacturing gives them. Already, the largest singular part of SNB is the GPU, dwarfing the size of any individual CPU core. Hopefully we'll get something that's better than their previous offerings.Reply

probably the GPU performance will enhance a lot, lets hope they get into the range of basic gaming gpu, but the main problem is that by the time that IVY arrives the AMD APU Fusion series will also have launched there second gen, and it is known already that this will be much more powerfull.Reply

It's not just that, by the time IB has launched TSMC should have it's 28nm process working which means that AMD/nVidia's discrete cards will be twice as fast (twice the transistor density) leaving the IGPs back in the dust again.

SB's IGP wouldn't look as good as it did if TSMC's 32 nm process hadn't been scrapped giving intel a half node advantage. They'll have the same with IB, but only going from 12 to 16 EUs makes it likely they're using a big chunk of the gain to cut costs instead of boosting performance.Reply

It doesn't matter how fast IGP's are compared to discrete graphics (it never has been). What matters is if the IGP allows for playable framerates at common desktop/notebook resolutions (we're talking 1280X1024 19" and similar widescreen resolutions). People with 1080p and higher resolutions won't be gaming on these, the other 95% of people that go to Best Buy and Dell to get a system will be.

And we need these "awesome" IGP's now. They maintain the bottom teir graphics that development houses still have to cater too (and consoles). Once those graphics capabilities become "good enough" for moderate resolutions the game makers can finally start cranking up the graphics quality and giving these new cards a workout.

I've never gamed on an IGP and never plan too, but I understand just how important they are to us gamers.Reply

X67/68 do not exist. Z68 will come out soon, and like P67/H67 and a few others we mention, they will support Ivy Bridge with the appropriate firmware/BIOS updates. (That will be more a factor of the motherboard manufacturers taking time to update the firmware than anything.) X58 will be replaced by X79, which as we noted in an earlier article is a completely different socket.Reply

looks like it's not going quite as fast as was expected; prior rumors had it stripped from the x79 chip too.

OTOH if filling in all the expansion slots in an ATX board would've been tricky with x79, it's going to be even worse for enthusiast z7x boards unless the number of lanes on the southbridge is increased, especially if DMI isn't given a boost to allow the SB lanes to run at 3.0 speeds as well. 2x gb nics, and 3rd party audio will take 3 lanes. Additional usb3 and sata 6gb controllers will take 1 each. That leaves at most 3 SB lanes to make 1x slots. The situation is worse if the board makers insist on adding legacy firewire or pata ports. Thunderbolt ports will IIRC eat a PCIe lane each as well. I suspect 4 to 8 lane pcie bridge chips (or possibly PCIe to PCI bridge chips) will end up being fairly common on these boards.Reply

Do the current 6-series chipsets connect to the CPU with a 20Gbps DMI link, which isn't even enough for all the potential peripherals if they're all maxed out, but in practice that almost never happens.

Realistically, the SATA ports are pretty much never going to all be 100% utilized at the same time, and the same goes for the PCIe ports and USB ports. It's possible Intel will tweak the DMI interface to boost bandwidth as well, which could easily accommodate the additional bandwidth heavy devices.Reply

I was looking at the number of devices to connect, not total bandwidth (pcie to pci or pcie-pcie (more lanes) bridge chips don't help with that.

My observation is that after you connect all the devices to the PCIe bus that need to be connected, you don't have enough lanes left to fill out all 7 slots on an enthusiast level full atx board. Depending on the chipset you have anywhere between 1 and 3 slots off the CPU, and at most 3 1x slots off the southbridge. With thunderbolt potentially eating a 6th, and a few of the 6x series boards having enough USB3 controllers to have 8 or 10 USB3 ports, it's entirely possible to use up all of the southbridge's 8 lanes just on onboard controllers. The main advantage I see in potentially running the SB lanes at PCIe3 speeds isn't total bandwidth which isn't likely to be saturated; but allowing board makers to use 4xUSB,3 4x SATA6GB, or 2x GB nic controllers to get their port inflation numbers up while only consuming a single PCIe lane instead of 2.Reply

That or they should bump the number of lanes on the southbridge from 8 to 12ish to allow connecting as many low average bandwidth devices as they could when the PCI controller was still available. IIRC the controller on Intel's current desktop boards supports 5 PCI devices.Reply

If you remember, current P67 motherboards share PCIe lanes. If you drop a card in the bottom PCIe gfx 4x slot, it disables some on-board things (firewire, some USB headers, etc). In essence, the lanes are shared amongst the devices already.Reply

I wasn't aware of anything like that, I assume the disabled headers are USB3 since there's no reason to disable any of the USB2 ports. The firewire port surprises me though, I'd always assumed it would have been stuck on the legacy PCI bus since there's plenty of capacity there and no need for the higher speeds of PCIe.Reply

While you're probably right about it not seeing much traction in the enthusiast market, assuming it trickles down to the mobile chipset as well, support for a third monitor would be really nice for my work laptop.Reply

This basically are the rumors we have heard from other places summed up here. Of coz being Anandtech this means the rumors are realistic.

The EU are properly a lot different to current SandyBridge, We expect to have double the Gfx Performance from Ivy Bridge. If any of the previous Intel slide are to be trusted. 22nm would also allow much higher Clock Speed for GPU part.

I hope Anandtech could find out whether Ivy Bridge have FMA.

$100 for a 20GB SLC SSD is really expensive, compare to the previous rumors of 40 - 50 USD.Reply

Ivy Bridge IGP will only have 16 EUs which is only 33% more than what SB has. Like Anand mentioned in the SB review, it unfortunately looks unlikely that the IB IGP would be twice as fast, which is a shame.

In the original version, I said the "Larsen Creek" SSD will be priced at around 50$ like the rumors have suggested but apparently Jarred edited that. Of course it is safer to say 100$ and then be happily surprised when it turns out to be 50$ instead of getting those angry comments when it turned out to be 100$ instead of 50$. Reply

My thought is that these "Next Gen EU " would be completely different to current EU, that is why it is not fair to compare EU numbers to performance.

And if this new EU runs 33% faster per clock, and runs at 33% higher clock while having 33% more EU then previous EU, should land us at 100% performance increase.

Of coz, Hardware dont matter much on GPU, not at all. It is software, drivers that makes ALL the difference. As we have seen with S3. Nvidia has double the Software Engineering compare to hardware working on it. And if Intel continue the way it is, their GPU hardware will never get the respect they deserve.

I think Intel GPUs get pretty much the respect they deserve. As long as they keep crippling the mainstream parts by putting in crap like HD2000 they don't deserve any respect. The only decent GPU they have is the HD3000 in the 'k' series which will never be used by the people that buy 'k' series parts (ok, 1% might).Reply

Kristian,thanks for an article full of details. However, I find this article harder to read than necessary. Because it is peppered with abbreviations that I'm not familiar with. They might be daily use for an Intel enthisiast but they have not yet reached the mainstream.

May I suggest AnandTech adds to their awesome Benches a Glossary and links the first use (in an article) of any name or abreviation to a short definition page with a list of serach results for the term (good Google juice if you knwo what I mean). That would make it so much easier to brush up on a term the reader is not familiar with.

Alternatively (or in addition) spell out the names of technologies with appreviations at theri first use, such as S... R... T ... (SRT) so that one can form a mental word for the appreviation and better understand what is said.

That said, keep up the good work. One wants to read these articles and understand in detail as opposed to skimming just for buzz words and chatter (slashdot I'm looking at you).

P.S.: The formatting of tables, etc. often does not scale with enlarging the font, but that is for another post.Reply

Thanks for the feedback. I'm still learning and sometimes it's just hard to use the full name instead of the abbreviation, mainly because in the forums I go everyone uses abbreviations.

While I don't want to blame Jarred for this, in the original version at least the SRT was first mentioned as Smart Response Technology (SRT) so people get the idea of what the SRT means. In the original version, there is also info on the Z68 and SRT in general but due to the NDA, we couldn't publish it so that might have added confusion since some parts of the other areas of the article referred to that.

If you really want to be helpful, send me an email (click my name above the article) and give me more examples of the cases where you wish that the abbreviation should be explained more clearly :-)Reply

Just to clarify, we are under NDA on Smart Response Technology until Z68 launches, at which point Anand will have a full explanation as well as performance results. That also takes care of the Larsen Creek SSD, so I'm as interested as the next guy to see what it will do for performance. Basically, I had to cut a whole page from the review where Kristian discussed SRT and Z68 features, but we'll have the official launch soon enough to fill in the gaps. :-)Reply

This roadmap screams to me that Intel does not support Thunderbolt for non Apple systems.

I'd have expected the next set of chipsets to support it for display and other purposes. Instead we see USB 3.0 accross teh board. Not that that is bad, but the lack of Thunderbolt in all of 6 new chipsets is really sendign a message (It's Apple only technology) despite all the statements otherwise.Reply

Thunderbolt is dumb. Many systems get 1 port. That gets used when you plug in your display via DisplayPort, and there it goes completely unused! Even if you have a spare port and find something to plug into it, it won't be any faster than USB3 would be. So what's the point?

I think Apple wanted it since it was "cool, light!" for their marketing, and then engineering common-sense managed to win, since metal wires are cheaper. Intel likes it since they get to sell boatloads of Intel-only controllers. USB3 makes more sense in many ways.Reply

Thunderbolt supports daisy-chaining so you can connect up to 7 devices into one port. I'm pretty sure most of the TB devices will support DC when they start rolling out. Plus, you can always get a hub if you have devices that don't support.

Moreover, there are currently two computers from Apple that have TB so you can't conclude that most systems in the future will be stuck with one port. The 27" already has two BTW. Reply

No. X79 will be for Sandy Bridge-E, which uses socket LGA2011. There's a schism between the ultra-high-end enthusiast platforms and the "mainstream enthusiast" platforms, which is a continuation of the X58 and P55 split. The problem is that where X58 was clearly superior to P55 platforms in most performance metrics, X58 vs. P67 suddenly didn't look so compelling. We'll eventually get the "fix" for that in Q3/Q4 when SNB-E launches, but just like X58 vs. P67 we'll have X79 vs. Z77 in 1H'2012 to make things difficult.Reply

Thanks Jarred.So the X79 platform will have no CPU upgrade path at all? It will ONLY ever take SNB-E CPU's? Being as Ivy Bridge is just a "tick" and not a new architecture i would have thought X79 would get a IB CPU for LGA2011 that just needs a BIOS update.Reply

I'd still be wary of the crap that Intel did to us 1366 users. Promising an 'affordable' 6 core upgrade, but never releasing a chip coming even close to $500. That's what happens when AMD can't compete.Reply

That would make sense. It looks like Intel has switched their product release cycles. Before, it was high-end chips first and then mainstream chips later on (at least this was the case with Nehalem, I'm too lazy today to check anything older that that :D). Now it is the vice versa. Mainstream chips in H1 and high-end/enterprise in H2.

This make sense though since enterprise level stuff is more complex and thus needs more time and money to be designed, tested etc. Reply

It does make sense in some ways, the other half though is that there're lots of people who bought 2500/2600K systems that probably would've bought LGA2011 quads at the higher margins if the high end part launched first.Reply

Lets say someone drops an Ivy Bridge CPU in an existing 6 series motherboard, could it run at DDR3-1600 or only at 1333? Technically, the memory controller is in the CPU die, so it sounds reasonable to say it would do 1600. On the other hand though, the motherboard would have to be able to handle the speed and would doubtlessly have some sort of UEFI settings related to it. Any thoughts here?Reply

Personally I want to see confirmation that Ivy Bridge will be on X79 (in good time) otherwise there would be no hesitation. But I forsee a dead end for X79 like with X58 and I just don't like it. If IB won't be on X79 quickly enough and IB turns out to be quite a bit faster at a smaller process.. but that means waiting for IB. Bloody hellReply

Yup, that's what I gathered. Frankly I don't see any point in LGA 2011 if, as I expect, IB is much faster than SB at the same clock speeds. You then get to wait for IB while the supposedly more 'mainstream' platform is faster than the high-end platform.Reply

I would say the primary market for LGA 2011 parts is the enterprise market. The mainstream products (LGA 1155) lack many necessary features (PCIe lanes, ECC, DP setups...) that are required by servers and higher-end workstations. While there is Xeon E3-1200 lineup, it does not offer more than four cores and there is no option for DP setup either.

For enterprises, the raw CPU performance is not always the number one concern. Fast I/O options are usually crucial and the 16 PCIe 2.0 lanes provided by mainstream SB may not be enough for those needs. In most cases, the performance per watt is also essential, especially in servers which are online 24/7. That is why Xeon lineups often offer low-power options.

From consumer's standpoint, SB-E may look like it makes no sense but in the end, it is not really aimed at them. There will be few CPUs for enthusiasts but other than that, it's solely Xeons. Reply

Anyone know if the Ivy Bridge IGP is supposed to support 120Hz desktop? I don't expect true stereoscopic 3D on it, but it'd be nice for a 3D laptop to not switch from 120 to 60 when running on IGP.120Hz would also be helpful for playing 24FPS blu-ray.Reply

"A final interesting point for many users is that Ivy Bridge is pin compatible with Sandy Bridge, and it will work on current LGA1155 motherboards with the appropriate chipset and a firmware and BIOS update (H61, H67, P67, and Z68 are capable of support IB). Intel will also launch new 7-series chipsets, which we’ll get into below."

Yeah, I believe it when I see it. They said the same thing with the 915/925 chipsets, but when it came down to it, they changed the VRM requirements and controls and a new motherboard was required for Core 2 chips anyway. I bet they do the same thing.

On the other side of the fence, I have a Nvidia Nforce 590SLi board (socket AM2) that supports even the newest 6 core chips with only a bios upgrade, if I want to replace it. I recently upgraded it from the Athlon 64 6400+ chip (3.2GHz with no overclocking potential and 125W power consumption) to a Athlon II X2 260 (3.2GHz, overclockable to 3.7GHz, and only 65W power usage) for $70. It doesn't sound like an upgrade, but the power savings alone will pay for it in less than 6 months, considering its my file server.

Intel does have a big history of making people upgrade an entire platform to upgrade. I don't expect them to change that.Reply

appart from what i have seen looks it nice but why does nt intel take out the integrate hd graphics in 3 type of processors and make them hexacore with hyperthreating. i mean sb is extremely powerfull and ivy bridge wil be more powerfull and more efficient. and for me it does not make that much sense such powerull procesoors and igpu?Reply